Tourmaline abbreviated

January 17, 2006: It's early afternoon, but already the day feels expired. I left the apartment at 6:45 early slung with guitar, towel, and wetsuit. Jenny was still mid-ablution, still tugging on her boots by the time I was knocking down the stairs with my Guild case, pick in pocket. The partment Jenn and I live in is older than old and centered--in old communal fashion--round a red-tiled atrium. Morning smells, morning sounds waft central. Percolating coffee, a.m. pastries, first cigarettes--it's a caffeinated perfume that winds down and into the atrium foyer amid catches of morning radio and wake-up music (Marty and Zane next door always enliven the third floor with something euro-beat each and every sunrise--our kitchen pots reverberate on their rack in steady 4:4 time come daybreak).

I meet Surf Diva Alyssa outside. White pick-up truck, boards cozied and ajutting angular out the bed. It's 6:45 and it's Pacific cold and, were the Surf Report broadcasting in this January hour, it would relay an air-temp of forty-something and a water temp in the high fifties. This is oceanic devotion: a pre-coffee, bleary-eyed, ante-jentacular drive to the coast. The dusk-and-dawn birds are pirouetting away from the shoreline, away from the sunrise; the be-suited pencil-jockeys are just merging onto the 5, cell phones already on-point. I am happy to be in this pick-up cab, warmed air playing on the feet--not looking forward to the cold neoprene suit, but definitely looking forward to that moment when pins-and-needles cold ceases to matter and the water is swelling just so. Float some, ride some. Look around and watch the California Brown Pelicans, just emerging from their eclipse plumage, dive in gannet fashion through the swells...